Chapter 29
Ineeded a moment.
No—I probably needed much more than one moment, but I was only going to take one.
The others were moving, talking, whispering. Crying.
I was crying, too. My cheeks were still wet and there was something gnawing at my insides, but I couldn’t tell what. The device was there on the floor, with those metal strings wrapped all around the glass ball again, the light still burning inside it.
But we’d already seen what it contained. We’d already seen what memory was inside it.
Reggie. Silas. Magic in a color that wasn’t supposed to exist at all.
I found myself sitting on the floor, but I wasn’t the only one. Most had sat, too, and they were staring into nothing, thinking. Trying to figure it out.
It wasn’t that hard. We already knew that Silas had been half Timekeeper. We just didn’t know that that would translate into the color of his magic as well.
Now we did.
“I know this,” Mimi whispered from where she sat on her legs on my right. “I knew this, I think—I knew them and I knew how they smiled and how they talked to each other, but then…I don’t.”
Yes. That summed it up very nicely.
“I think Reggie showed me that thing once,” Seth said, hands on his cheeks as he stared at the device with teary eyes.
“I think they were lovers,” Levana said. “It looked like it.”
Yes. It did.
“Who took the memory out of him, though?” Russ asked.
“Was it the queens?” Erith.
My stomach twisted.
Eyes on me all at once. “Where exactly did you get this, Ora?”
I wasn’t weirdo anymore, it seemed.
Pulling my sketchbook out of my backpack again, I held it close until I found the drawing of the device, then showed it to them. They all leaned in to see better.
“I saw it on Master Talik’s shelf. I recognized it because I drew this…before. So, I took it.” I closed my sketchbook again, put it in my backpack, and took out the library book. “I was trying to figure out what it was.”
I stood up and put the book on the nearest table—I’d have to come back to put it in its place tomorrow. Right now, I didn’t have the energy or the will.
Then I went and grabbed the device off the floor, too, while the others stood up.
“What are you going to do with it?” Russ asked.
“Put it back where I found it.” That had always been the plan.
“Shouldn’t we tell someone about this?” Anika asked.
“No,” a few people said at once.
“No—what’s the point? Reggie’s dead. Silas is dead,” Seth said, and he was right.
“Guys, that…” Levana shook her head, eyes glossy with tears still. “That didn’t look like someone who would curse the entire world.”
Silence in the library.
“I mean, he shielded Reggie and left himself open,” said Russ.
“He was terrified…” Mimi whispered. “I think I…I think I liked him before.”
Yes, I think I liked him, too.
“Then we can all agree to keep this to ourselves until we know more,” March said after a moment. “Keep it for now. Hide it,” he told me.
Reluctantly, I nodded. Because if I could just find this thing and pick it up in the workshop, anybody could.
“This is ticked up,” Cook whispered, and he always stayed a few feet behind everybody, and he was squatting near the table, head in his hands. “I never saw him do magic—he…he was never in school when we had special projects. I never saw him.”
And now he knew why.
“Let’s go, everyone. Let’s get to bed. We only have tomorrow to rest, and then it’s trial time,” Anika said. “I’m gonna need some ice first…”
I didn’t raise my head, but I knew she looked at me. If she expected an apology, she was going to end up disappointed.
Still, I waited until most of them were already halfway out of the library, and of course, March waited with me. I looked at him, my backpack against my chest.
If only I’d spoken to him first about this.
If only I’d just spoken to him.
Except now, when I opened my mouth to speak, I said, “I don’t need you to protect me, Heartling. I had it handled.”
And now the memory of him with his knee on Russ’s chest and his hand around his neck was at the center of my mind.
“I never said you didn’t.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “So, you’re not only a traitor, but you’re also a thief. What else have you stolen?”
I flinched before I could help it. Why did it hurt when he spoke to me like that?
“Nothing. I haven’t stolen anything.” I turned to leave.
He came after me. “You sure?”
I didn’t say anything, only hurried my steps.
“A thank you would have sufficed,” March continued, and he deliberately stayed a couple feet behind because he could keep up with me whenever he wanted. Easily.
“A traitor, a thief—and ungrateful,” he said, and the others were just a corner away. I could hear them, but even so, I stopped. I turned. I was angry and tired and disappointed and embarrassed—but most of all, I was just fed up with this madness.
“And what does that tell you, huh, Heartling?” He stopped—clearly he didn’t expect a reaction. “Let me spell it out for you then—stay. Away. From. Me. Don’t come after me, don’t talk to me, don’t try to be my hero—just stay away.”
To say he was shocked would be an understatement, but he was frozen in place for a good second with his mouth open and his eyes wide, and I took advantage of the situation to practically run all the way to my room.
I passed others, too, backpack still to my chest, head down, and I swore to all the seconds that had ever passed that I was going to explode for real if someone else said a single thing to me.
Nobody did, though. I made it all the way to my room without another attack, and I locked the door twice for good measure, before I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for hours to come.
The next evening, Lida came to wake me by banging on my door with both her fists.
“I knocked politely. Twice,” she told me when I unlocked the door, disoriented, still dressed, expecting to find a monster coming to eat me in her stead.
Apparently, the surprise she so kindly didn’t reveal to me still, was coming soon, and that’s why we were only going to Master Talik’s class today, and we were skipping Asha’s training altogether.
I asked why at least a dozen times, but she didn’t say.
She just demanded I change my clothes and hurry out of the room to eat dinner before class.
Elida was waiting for us in the hallway, too, and she insisted we hurry as well, and the other Hands were just as confused as I was. Just as swollen-eyed and sleepy. I would imagine none of them got any decent sleep since last morning, after what we saw from that heartlock in the library.
Shivers erupted all over me at the reminder, and when March came out of his room just as I walked past it, I didn’t need to even turn to know that his eyes were on me.
All their eyes were on me at one point or the other, but right now none of them watched me the way they did last morning.
None of them wanted to push me around or pick a fight with me, call me names.
Russ looked just like he always did, and Anika seemed perfectly fine, too. No red on her cheek and she wasn’t holding the side of her head anymore, but she did flinch when she caught me looking at her during dinner once.
I wasn’t angry. I didn’t think any of us were angry at this point—we’d already seen too much. Reggie’s memory weighed over all our shoulders. The face of Silas, his smile, his magic, the way he’d looked at Reggie…
How would a boy like him put a curse on the entire realm—and for what? Why would he, when he’d so clearly proved with his actions that he cared more about the life of another than his own? He’d used his magic to shield Reggie while he’d been stabbed by those knives in two places himself.
What reason would a being like that have to want the entire realm destroyed?
Because Reggie was alive when he cast the curse, and Silas must have known it.
If he’d gone above and beyond, had risked revealing his identity in the garden instead of risking Reggie’s life, how could that same person then turn around and try to kill—not just Reggie, but the entire world?
The others thought it, too. I doubted any of them had come up with an answer yet.
At the workshop, Elida was with us, watching us from the back like a hawk.
When it was my turn to go to the main table with Master Talik as he demonstrated how to disconnect a clock-bomb, I took my backpack with me, just in case.
The Hands might have not been looking at me wrong today, but they had just last morning.
If it hadn’t been for March intervening when Russ tried to attack me, I wasn’t sure how the morning would have ended. Certainly not like it did.
But I still didn’t trust them, and I kept the heartlock with me. Half of me was convinced that I should return it in the same box I took it from. It wasn’t my heartlock nor was it my memory. Whatever the reason I’d drawn that device, I’d seen all there was to see in it.
I had yet to make a decision.
March sat with me on the last row today, too, and I felt his eyes on the side of my face most of the time, but I never dared to look back. What I said to him last morning came back to me with every heartbeat, and what he said to me still hurt. Stabbed at my chest like actual knives.
Traitor, thief—and ungrateful.
I wasn’t a traitor, was I? And I wasn’t a thief—I’d only borrowed the heartlock because I’d been curious. And I wasn’t ungrateful—I was thankful March had showed up at the library when he did.
But how could I say that when he kept telling me how he didn’t trust me every chance he got?
“All right, that’s all for today, boys and girls!”
The moment March was done watching Master Talik demonstrate which wires to cut when dealing with the clock-bomb, Elida was on her feet, clapping her hands, rubbing them together like she was suddenly excited.
Master Talik hardly glanced up as he started to gather the half-dismantled clock-bombs into empty boxes, and Elida rushed us all out the door.
I didn’t care what the great reveal was or what this surprise they insisted on included.
I just wanted her to get it over with so I could go to my room and be by myself, sketch, think, hopefully sleep until the next day arrived.
The third trial was just around the corner, and the second one had already proved to us that what we learned in the past three days would most likely be perfectly useless.
Whatever we would have to deal with, the best I could hope for was to be rested and well-fed going in.
At least that’s what I thought.
Then Elida stopped us just as we reached our dorms and stood before us with a nervous grin, her hat over her head still, her cheeks slightly flushed.
“On behalf of our queens, The White and the Red, please allow me, dearest Hands, to formally invite you to the Backward Banquet that will be held today in your honor here at the Labyrinth, just before sun-unset.”
I thought at first I must have heard her wrong. Everybody else must have thought so, too, because they were all turning to one another—even to me—to make sure we’d all heard the same words out of Elida’s mouth.
“A banquet? You mean like…a party?” Erith finally asked.
“Exactly! Exactly like a party, except a very special party that we’ve gone over and beyond to make sure you thoroughly enjoy, while at the same time, of course, keeping you perfectly safe.” A wink.
Now I was even more confused than before.
Elida was acting strange—well. Stranger than usual. She was sweating, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. Even that wink looked painful, like she forced every fiber of her being to do it.
“Tell the queens I said thank you. I will not be going to a banquet today,” I said and turned around to leave.
Except… “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Ora. You all will attend the party at sun-unset. Queens’ orders.”
I turned. Looked at her. Wanted to speak but was too stunned for a moment.
“Our trial is tomorrow. We don’t need to waste time in parties,” March said, which could have been words he’d heard from my own mind.
“They can’t just force us to go to a party when we don’t want to, can they?
” Helen asked—and I was pretty sure she knew about the heartlock and Reggie’s memory we saw last night, even though she’d been the only one of the Hands who was in her room, resting, after having thrown up throughout dinner.
Somebody must have told her because she had that same haunted look on her face since nightfall like the rest of us.
“It’s a party in your honor,” said Elida, fidgeting with her fingers so hard I thought she might pull them all off her hands. “The queens will not take no for an answer. You will get ready and I will meet you out here in two hours. Go—go get ready!”
“But—” Erith started, but Elida didn’t want to hear it.
“Go on, now! Off you go.” She waved us back toward the rooms. “Don’t be late. We mustn’t leave the queens and the guests waiting.”
And she turned around to leave.
“Guests?” The word slipped from my lips before I caught it.
Elida was gone, though.
“What in the Everstill…” Anika whispered, and the next second all the doors to our rooms opened, one after the other. The help, each maid and butler who ad been assigned to us since the beginning, stepped aside.
“Come, come—we don’t have much time,” a couple of them said in unison.
I looked at Lida standing by my room at the end of the hallway. Surprise, she’d said.
This wasn’t a surprise—this was a fucking nightmare.
My legs refused to move. I looked at the others again, hoping at least one of them would have a decent plan on how to get out of this, but they seemed just as lost and as horrified as I felt.
Then March shrugged. “Looks like we’re partying tonight.”
He turned around and walked to his room with his head up.
The rest followed, and I managed to get myself moving at last as well, cursing under my breath. But no amount of wishing or praying or being angry at the entire world changed anything.
I ended up going to the stupid party together with all of them two hours later.